Author: Ran Nir

Parts
of the search engine optimisation work e-commerce sites undertake
require a certain level of technical understanding which is where SEO
consultants can shine. Other parts need some common sense and an eye
for detail.

Here are five SEO mistakes e-commerce sites make, so that you
don't have to make them...

Having spent time improving your SEO, building natural links and
optimising on site elements then I bet you cannot wait to see the
results. If you're anything like most people (including yours truly),
you'd look at traffic to your site as an indication of how well you've
done. Although the end result is higher numbers of visitors to your
site due to better ranking, it might be while before your ranking will improve.

On the other hand by using Google
Analytics it's easier to see short term improvement in your SEO by
extracting hidden data gems so it's really a question of knowing where
to look. Here are four tips...

Using a few Google Analytics advance filters, it’s very easy to create a handy Twitter-specific profile which groups together twitter sources such as web clients and short URL services.

If you've read my earlier post 2 easy ways to track social networks in Google Analytics, you should be quite familiar with using advance filters in Google Analytics. A large percentage of Twitter's traffic is coming from phone or desktop based clients, in which case they'll appear as direct traffic so be sure to place extra attention to filter three.

With so many resources spent on social media marketing these days, the job of analyzing its effectiveness in the overall marketing mix is becoming more important.

If you're using Google Analytics to track your site's visitors and revenue, you'll notice that by default you can analyze traffic mediums such as direct, organic etc, but what about social networks as a standalone traffic medium?

To achieve this level of reporting in Google Analytics and to basically tweak Google Analytics to create this traffic medium, you've got two options.

An important part of successfully managing your search engine optimisation targets is to nudge the search results your way when it's in your control. To help you achieve this target, there are some links you should prevent from getting indexed by the engines to begin with.

Firstly, because they offer little or no user experience benefits, secondly because they might get indexed instead of the desired content and lastly because preventing the engines from crawling unnecessary pages will reduce your bandwidth costs.

Whether you're new to SEO or an experienced consultant we all prefer automated tools, free when possible, which make our life just a bit easier at times and allow us to spend more time on the creative elements of the SEO work. By successfully using these tools and others, you'll be able to concentrate on what you do best.

Below are some of my favorite tools which I normally recommend on my blog to support your SEO work:

There's no two ways about this, Google and the other search engines have their favourites. I'm sure you've seen it all before, either working for your client or evaluating your competition. There are a number of sites in every niche, whatever content they publish they rank well whether or not the content is optimised, has any inbound links and without really trying too hard.

You, on the other hand might have worked hard to rank for that content, have got some great natural links, lots of buzz but you've got little to show for it. What you don't know is that these websites have managed to reach a high trust level with the search engines which helps their content rank highly.

SEO for online retailers is the process of improving a website
potential in order to gain more organic non-paid traffic from the major
search engines. Normally, SEO uplift doesn't happen overnight and it
can take a long while to rank well for non brand key terms.

The rule of
thumb is this: the more competition a relative term has, the harder you'll
find it to rank for the term. With that said, you've got to start
somewhere and there at least 50 ways I can think of to improve your SEO.